Are you pissed off? I'm pissed off. Vent Thread.

[adsf]

So true.

Got the temp idea from the sleep chapters in The 4 Hour Body. Tried it out, and I didn't feel like 20 minutes of sleep after 6 hours in bed anymore. Problem is, I HATE being cold.

Also, melatonin production is stimulated by natural sunlight? I know I have trouble sleeping longer when I am on the night shift. When on the day shift, I have no problems being late for work :\

[rynne]

The dude who shares my grad office has the most annoying sneezes in the world.  He'll be sitting there and all of a sudden go "AAAHH-CHOOO!" at full-shout volume.  Since I'm usually focused on my computer screen, I get no warning and it scares the ever-loving fuck out of me. Every. Fucking. Time.

The only thing worse is the office phone, whose ringer must be set to be heard over machine-gun fire and inevitably only gets calls for people who haven't sat in this room for years, if at all.

[Goose]

Sorry rynne, I'm one of those sneezers too.  They're disgustingly loud, violent, and come without warning.  I try to make a point to apologize to those within ear shot of my cube when they do happen though.  I feel bad for people who have to be around me during the spring melt, when my allergies really flare up.

As for my bitch of the day: fuck Alcatel, and fuck their French engineers square in their non-fuck-oriented holes.

These fuckwits put together a device for policy management on optical networks, and gave it a nice friendly SOAP-based interface.  As far as device interfaces go, SOAP is sometimes good, when implemented properly.  It has a defined structure for describing what needs to be sent in for what commands and situations, and a detailed fault mechanism for handling error situations.  From the perspective of someone like me, who has to build software to automate interaction with this device, its normally pretty good, because everything's already programmatically defined and easy to build against.  But that detailed fault mechanism that's built in to the SOAP protocol?  Apparently these fucks saw that and said "meh, whatever". 

In the 7,000 pages of documentation on this fucking device, there isn't a single bloody page that details in any way, shape, or form what happens when, say, you try to add a subscriber that already exists, or if there's a syntax error in the command you send it, or whatever.  Of course, I designed my software thinking it'd be some offshoot of SOAP's built-in mechanisms.  HOLY FUCK WAS I WRONG!!  This fucking thing just jams error code in wherever it fucking feels like it.  SOAP faults are never used!  Instead, I'll get some random fucking XMLException that isn't documented anywhere.  Or, if you try to add a subscriber that already exists, it sends back what would normally be a "yay, subscriber added" message, with an error slapped on the end essentially telling you to ignore the previous "yay".

And given that there's ZERO fucking pages written about what errors can come back and when, I basically have to write the most shitty hacked up bullshit to try and deal with the odd one-off situations my client companies come across, and hope this thing doesn't bury errors in any other odd places so that my program doesn't think commands were successful when they really weren't.  Not to mention the fact that all of this completely invalidates the SOAP protocol as a whole, making my attempts to automate this shit even more hacky and ugly.  I fucking hate writing shit code like this, but I have no choice now.

Fuck Alcatel and their fucking French fuckwit engineer fucks.  Last night I actually tried to set Mass Effect's language to French just so I could hear some fucking aliens scream in agony in French as I shot them in the fucking face.  Turns out my copy doesn't have a French language track, just subtitles.  Not as effective.

[r00]

The dude who shares my grad office has the most annoying sneezes in the world.  He'll be sitting there and all of a sudden go "AAAHH-CHOOO!" at full-shout volume.  Since I'm usually focused on my computer screen, I get no warning and it scares the ever-loving fuck out of me. Every. Fucking. Time.

ugh.  The annoying sneezer around me at work is on the opposite end of that spectrum.  Every time she sneezes, it is this put on little cutesy-wootsey mouse sneeze hacheeeewwww.  It's so squeaky and so unbelievably fake and so fits her attention whore personality.  Oh look at me!  I am so cute that even my sneezes are petite and adorable!

Sometime when she does it, I can't help myself and say out loud something like "who stepped on a mouse."

[tim]

My sneezes could be in a Pringles advert.

[luna]

Terry fox's mom died today

[doom]

Working in warehouse in the dead heat of summer with no air conditions fucking sucks.
also, working two jobs, 6 days a week does too.

I am grateful, but yeah.

[sin]

I used to think "luxury items" were things like TVs and vacations.  Now that I'm making about $1000/mo I realize that "luxury items" are things like pickles and 2-play toilet paper.

edit:  at the meeting last Monday, the Senior Counselor announced that one of the staff was leaving to take a management position at another location "so we'll need people to cover her hours for the rest of the month."

There was a slight hesitation before she added: "...and overtime has been approved."

As soon as she said that it was like a pack of hyenas tearing at an antelope as everyone was trying to grab the schedule and pencil themselves into as many hours as possible.

Having the fastest reflexes and a mean right elbow, I managed to wrest the schedule away from my competitors and got myself some pretty cherry hours for the rest of the month, which should help me out a lot.

[Naylzie]

I used to think "luxury items" were things like TVs and vacations.  Now that I'm making about $1000/mo I realize that "luxury items" are things like pickles and 2-play toilet paper.

That's a fucking shitty realization to come to, but I know it well =\  Hopefully things will continue to improve, but in the meantime, we're trying not to get too accustomed to having a stocked pantry* and good toilet paper.

Congrats on the hours though!  I hope the OT helps cushion the blow for you.

*Stocked pantry here meaning "something more than ramen, macaroni and cheese, and peanutbutter and jelly in the house."

In venting news, though things are better than they have been financially, we got fucking broken into =|  This is, collectively, the fourth time the house has been hit in some way in the last fucking YEAR.  27 years of nothing, according to our landlord, whom I trust because he has always been honest to (what others would perceive as) a fault and because he is a genuinely good human being, but suddenly 4 times in a year. 

First time, his bike disappeared from the garage while he and a freelancer friend of his were doing some work on the house.  The garage was open because they were in and out of it with relative frequency, but it happened that they were on the far side of the house, far enough back to lose sight of the driveway, and some punk made off with his bike.  He was pretty upset, and, of course, the bike was never recovered.  Not sure if he bothered with a police report or not.

Next, if I'm remember the order correctly, was my car stereo last June.  Car was completely locked up, but the Beloved had a braindead moment and forgot to close the hood after leaving it open to cool because of some radiator problems I hadn't been able to fix yet (the plan was to bring the car to the family mechanic THE NEXT DAY).  The next morning he timidly wakes me and tells me that he has some news I'm not going to want to hear.  On being informed that my stereo is gone, he may or may not have gotten a pillow to teh face, I punched a door (not hard enough to dent it, but it still hurt me), and I proceeded to spend the next hour or so sobbing.  It wasn't about the stereo, it's about the fact that they fucking broke into my car.  MY car.  MY space.  MINE.  Filed a report, nothing ever came of it.  Surprise surprise.   

Then, that fall, someone kicked in a basement window and stole a couple of laptops off the first floor, including the landlord's brand new one that he had only recently gotten to replace his dead desktop.  Reports were, of course, filed, but again, the laptops were never recovered.

And now yesterday, the last day of regular classes, I got home early (for me), and was lounging around the apartment on the computer.  I started getting cold because the temperature in the apartment is about a bazillion degrees lower than my classroom, so I went into the bedroom to grab a pair of sweatpants, whereupon I discovered that my jewelry had been unceremoniously strewn about and rifled through.  My first reaction was to hurl the first thing I picked up out the door of the bedroom.  Thankfully, the first thing I picked up was the empty sleeve in which there should have been a case of Lia Sophia earrings my aunt had bought for me with a matching necklace (which was left, at least).  My primary jewelry box is a cute little chest of drawers, and all of the removable drawers were in different places in the room, my makeup box was on its side, half open, on the floor, and quite a few things were *visibly* missing, including a gorgeous pair of drop pearl earrings (I have no idea if that's the technical name for them, but it's what my aunt called them) and quite a few other things I cannot reasonably afford to replace at this time.  Cue again the hysterical sobbing because this time, it wasn't "just" my car, it was my fucking bedroom, inside my fucking home. 

Around the time I was discovering all of this and rapidly transitioning from blinding rage to pathetic whimpering, the Beloved got a call from our landlord asking if we were missing anything, at which point I began shouting at my poor love, demanding to know if Doug was calling about this and if he knew anything and ...  I don't even remember what else.  I was shouting and angry and generally very distressed.  I probably wasn't entirely making sense.  Apparently the point of entry was the bottom floor back window, which they shattered with a lawn chair.

The police have been surprisingly quick to respond, and overall fairly conscientious, particularly given where we live.  I had an officer here taking a report from me around 6 or so, which was within an hour or so of my phone call, and they actually sent a detective from BCI over at 11 this morning to try to get some prints.  The upset makeup kit was a hard, non-porous plastic Caboodle, so I figured if there was anything that would be a printable surface, that was it.  The detective marveled at how suitable the surface was as well, assuring us that if there were prints to be had, we'd get them from it.  Sadly, there were none.  Also disappointing was the fact that my jewelry box wasn't heavily lacquered enough to lift a print from.  I thought *sure* with as shiny as the surface was that it wouldn't be too porous, but apparently it was.  The detective even asked for one of us to intentionally attempt to leave a print on it, to no avail.

The discussion with our landlord after the fact left me feeling no better though.  He expressed a necessity for heightened security measures in the house, which, of course, we agreed with.  However, our house is historically protected, so there are certain things that we can and cannot do to it with ease, some of which are legally imposed, and some of which seem to be just our landlord erring on the side of caution.  Things like replacing the windows are heavily restricted, which was a real pain in the balls over the last two years or so, but I digress.  The Beloved was the one who finally broached the topic of putting additional locks on the other doors in the house, because, until this point, the only protection our apartment has had from the outside are the front and back door locks.  It's no different than if this entire building were still one home because, though it has two addresses, the whole damn thing is interconnected and the design is very different from most of the smaller apartment situations I've encountered before it, leading me to believe that it was originally a single home.  Between the fact that our landlord extensively interviews potential tenants and the fact that, when we moved in, one or both of us were home a good portion of the time, we never really worried too much about it.  It's not people IN the house we have to worry about, it's the OUTSIDE world, who would hopefully be deterred by a) locked doors and b) the high chance of getting caught on ascent to the third fucking floor.

The proposal of locks was not well received.  Doug began going on about how he's tried to leave the woodwork as unmolested as possible and that he wants to avoid closing up the house, as the whole idea behind it was more as a community living space than closed off individuals.  Hell, that was a part of what was appealing about the place when I first found the listing.  The trouble with that is that we live in a fucking poor part of the city, and people are fucking cockyachts. 

We DO have a month-to-month lease still because we never bothered to change it over when we decided that we like it here (though there have been 4 incidents in the last year, we've been here for close to 5 total at this point), but there's no way we're going to find a place this nice with a landlord this good (in every other way, he's been absolutely stellar, including letting the Beloved knock $$ off the rent for doing general house-upkeep things and for us taking care of the building when he's away teaching) for what we're paying right now.  $750/month covers rent (1 bed, 1 bath, kitchen, storage, and living area), electric, gas, water, and internet.  To give you an idea, a studio in ROUGHLY this area with NOTHING included averages about $500/a month.  A lot of the studios I'm including in this average are actually in an EVEN WORSE part of town than where we are now, not to mention the dramatically decreased size and lack of included utilities.  Moving isn't really a viable option, but staying is looking less and less like an intelligent option.

Ugh.  wtf at life.  I know I'm lucky we weren't home.  I know I'm lucky our computers weren't taken.  That doesn't fix the feeling of violation that some motherfucker was IN MY BEDROOM taking things that were IMPORTANT TO ME because they were GIFTS and that he probably sold them for dramatically less than even market value for a fucking fix or a fucking gaming console or some shit (there has been strong speculation that it was some little shit who should have been in school but was not and was instead violating my personal space and helping himself to my possessions).



Jesus that was longwinded...  tl;dr of it is crime in the area is escalating, apartment got broken into, lost a lot of big ticket jewelry with great sentimental value as well (and a pair of glasses), landlord is being somewhat cagey about additional locks, but moving is not financially viable at this time.

[rokken like dokken]

Yeah, that sucks.  My wife lost a good portion of her jewelry when Air Canada left our bag behind in Los Angeles; it was all sentimental stuff and more than a few things I got for her so that's pretty crappy. 

Of course, that's not really quite the same because our privacy wasn't violated, which is always the worst thing.

[rynne]

Wow, that sucks.  I'd seriously look into beefing up your in-home security, and wouldn't trust too much in hoping that thieves'll be deterred by a two-story climb.  Before she moved in with me, Mrs. rynne's third-story apartment was broken into.  The thief was so blatant that she carried a push cart up two flights of stairs to help carry off everything she stole.  The only reason she didn't get anything was because one of Mrs. rynne's housemates happened to be home and scared the girl off.

You should check up on your local renters-rights laws.  I bet you'll have legal precedence to add locks to your interior doors regardless of your landlord.  If the building is being rented as separate units, I wouldn't be surprised if it's *required* to have locks to secure each unit from the common areas.

[doom]

Ever since my dad passed away, fathers day is just a harsh reminder of the fact.

[r00]

Sorry to hear about this, Nayl.  8(  Sounds like a rough time.  I agree with what rynne is saying about locking up your own portion of the house and that you have a right to do so, regardless of what the landlord is saying.  Also keep an eye out for your stolen items on your neighbors.  My experience has been that most rental robberies are from the people living either in the same complex or on the same block.

Do you have any sort of self protection in your place in case one of these dirtbags tries this when you are there?  It may be a good idea if you end up staying and can't install any extra locks for your area.  Sounds like you have some real refuse living around you.

[individualzero]

Gotta echo the above sentiments in here: a. that sucks ass and you have my condolences, and b. you may have to take protecting yourself into your own hands. I'm not saying install deadbolts in every window and door in the place and load up turrets to gun down invaders, nor that you should have to shoot to kill (no one wants that), but you can easily scare off a home invader if you have SOME kind of deadly weapon.

Fun story: When I was 15, a man tried to break down our back door after he couldn't pick the lock. At after three in the morning. I grabbed my Airsoft pistol (which probably looked like a big-ass thing in the darkness), ran to the back door, looked at him dead in the eye... and he ran off as soon as he knew that I was aware of his, uh ... unsavory entrance methods? The second he saw me point the muzzle of that gun at the window, he BOLTED and never looked back. Yeah. An airsoft pistol. Scared off a home invader.

By the time my dad came rushing in the back room and had grabbed a baseball bat, the guy was GONE. Ever since, I've kept that Airsoft pistol with an empty magazine in it by my bed. I spraypainted the safety cap black so it looks like an actual handgun. Now I don't go waving this thing around in my front yard, but I do keep it nearby in case I need to scare off some thug with a crowbar.

Most thieves aren't ballsy enough to move in if they encounter difficulties such as personal security or... well, someone pointing a knife/sword/gun at their face when they pop through the door. In most cases, they'll fuck off and you won't even have to hurt them.

[sin]

I really need to scrape together enough cash to see a chiropracter.  The right side of my lower back and my right hip have been in agony for the past month or so.  It hurts a lot just to stand up straight, or even do anything besides lying down or sitting as motionless as possible.  With all my health problems I'm feeling like I'm 70 instead of 26.

edit:  I'm currently running second in our "first of the gang to die" pool.